This blog is a great opportunity to share ideas about ways to
transform schooling as we know it, to help all students realise their
talents, passions and dreams. Be great to hear from anyone out there! Feel free to add a comment to Bruce's Blog and enter e-mail to receive postings

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

While schools are distracted by ensuring they are seen to do
well in achieving / improving their National Standards and NCEA data they are
creating the very hyper-accountability conditions that make it difficult for
creative teachers.

It seems that improving education now depends on what
politicians think is right and what is popular with the voters. Now National Standards are in place (although we
wait for National Tests, League Tables and teacher Performance agreement based
on the data produced) schools now are going to be sorted out by a system of
collaboration ( reminds me of WW2 France) led by ‘super’ teachers and principals. On
the surface this is another populist policy but essentially it is all about
bringing schools into line with government policy.

We will have to wait until a future government wakes up to
the fact that our survival depends on tapping the talents and passions of every
learner. As the late Sir Paul Callahan said we need to keep and attract all the
talent we can if we are ever to be an innovative country.

A new book ‘Creating Innovators- the Making of Young People
who will Change the World’ by Tony Wagner provides a real alternative if
schools are really going to develop an innovation-driven economy.

His book moves us away from current reform (really
tinkering with a failing system) and leads us into thinking about educational
transformation. Few of Wagner’s innovators associated their success with their
formal schooling but all valued the encouragement of a mentor and their parents
who gave them ‘creative confidence’.

In his book he profiles some of America’s young innovators
and reveals the conditions that nurtured their creativity and sparked their
imagination while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere.

Wagner
identifies patterns that educators could emulate in their classrooms. The
innovative individuals all had a childhood that involved creative play and the
fostering of deep-seated interests which eventually blossomed into deeper
purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion and purpose are the forces
that drive such innovators.

Wagner challenges schools to emulate this knowledge to
compensate for poor schooling.

He believes America needs to create an education
system that will create the next generation of innovators. Finnish education is
one that Wagner admires – the Finns 40 years ago transformed their education
system.

Wagner identifies the vital features of innovative schools
and workplaces:

have developed cultures of collaboration

based on interdisciplinary
problem solving

and intrinsic motivation.

He asks, ‘what are the capacities that matter most for innovation and
how are they best taught?’ And he worries that currently we do not measure any
of the skills that matter most. We need a different answer – a system to create
‘a hyper-imagination- enabling society’.

The innovators Wagner studied had all learnt the most important skill of all ‘the ability to learn on their own’. All couldn't stand the tedium of school.

Transforming the classroom experience at every level is
essential to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. We
need to ‘give them rich experiences and develop their confidence to explore,
question, test, experiment, and push on the boundaries of relevance.’ Things not
valued in our current school system – and this applies to teachers as well.

And if you want to learn more about how schools are failing
our students – particularly those form impoverished backgrounds listen to Geoffrey
Canada’s impassioned TED talk.

Canada
asks why school systems look so similar to how they looked 50 years ago?
Students were shown to be failing then. He believes it is because we cling to an
industrial age model that clearly doesn’t work. He is asking for systemic shifts
in order to help a greater number of kids excel.

Take the time to listen to two powerful inspirational TED talks bySir Ken Robinson if you are still not convinced

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving
case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines)
creativity.

Sir Ken believes that current education dislocates students from
their talents and to transform education we need to challenge what we take for
granted. His advice is similar to Tony Wagner and Karen Olsen and the kind of
education seen in kindergartens and in the rooms of creative

Kirsten Olsen author of the book ' Wounded by School-recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing up to
the Old School Culture'brings to light the devastating consequences of an
educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens
student's' interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Olsen's book
shows that current schooling does not favour all students and tends to shame,
disable and bore many learners.

We need to consider how schools need to be changed based on
new conceptions of learning assisted by the potential of new
technology. Schools ought to models of learning organisations not monuments to
past thinking

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